In a haunted valley

Nimue Brown

Aug 29

(Nimue)

Recently I had the remarkable experience of getting to see Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as an outdoor performance at Woodchester Mansion. This is an unfinished gothic building in a valley that has a reputation for being haunted.

As the performance got under way, I thought I heard a loud crowd of people in the woods behind us. As the play continued, it became apparent that there was an echo in the valley. However, sound bounced around in some truly odd ways, so by the time the echo came back it didn't sound much like the original speech at all.

One thing this suggests is that the way in which the valley distorts and reflects sound might well have caused or contributed to its reputation for being haunted.

However, it is a very unusual thing. There aren't many naturally occurring places where you can get much of an echo from an unamplified human voice, especially voices that aren't even shouting. I've never heard so much distortion in an echo before and the effect was genuinely eerie. Having been involved with events at this location in the past, I think it required clear voices and no background noise to work, along with people facing the right way.

I feel this as a human interaction with the spirit of the place. For me, spirit can be about physical realities. Where the shape of the valley is met by human voices, a strange kind of conversation can occur and whether you want to think about that in terms of physics or animism, it is still in essence an exchange between people and place.

Despite all of the rational explanations, I felt the returning sound as something strange. Humans aren't great at logic and reasoning, we make most of our decisions emotionally and intuitively. What is felt often has a lot more impact than what is reasoned. As I heard those strange, human-ish but not human voices from amongst the trees, I had a sense of otherness and the uncanny.

And of course perhaps it wasn't a curious effect of physics. Perhaps those voices from the trees came from somewhere else. An uncanny audience gathered unseen, but heard.

Clearly at some point I need to go back when there aren't many people about, and try talking or singing to the side of the valley myself.